"and their camera blank when they get out of jail in a few hours with no charges filed against them"
Yea right, what a load of cr@p. If this actually did happen to anyone with half a brain, they would have a quickfire way of getting a compensation award and having the cop fired.
Any lawyer would jump on this easy chance to get some cash.
I couldn't live without meat, but I have for some time now stopped eating Beef. Reasons:
1. Beef is amongst the most unhealthy meats around (good cuts aside, but they sure aren't what goes into your typical burger...).
2. Cattle farming is by far and large the most expensive & enviromentally damaging aspect of agriculture. Countless new compounds and potential scientific discoveries (from numerous fields) are being lost as the Amazon is cut down to produce cattle feed.
Therefore, I figure not eating Beef helps lengthen life in 2 ways. Longer time till you get heart disease (or similar), and when you eventually do, it's more likely there will be a drug available to cure it!
"The fact that Google won those suits, for the most part"
Huh?
Of the three examples, Google won only 1 of them (the news syndication case) in court and even then the judge still curtailed Google's plans somewhat.
The Gmail lack-of-privacy legal issues are ongoing and I certainly don't think many would claim they "won" the suit they settled out-of-court with the book publishers.
"you wasted two weeks of your life writing ineffective copy protection that does nothing to slow down pirates"
Just because someone managed to crack his copy-protection system doesn't mean writing it was a waste of time, it could still be having a massive effect on piracy levels.
Security (intellectual in this case) is never about complete 100% infalliblity, that's impossible. For example: no matter how thick the walls of your bunker are there will always be some bomb somewhere capable of beaking them down, if not, some nuke, if not some asteroid... but that doesn't mean a bunker with 3-metre thick walls isn't a damn good place to be when bombs are falling nearby.
Security is all about risk reduction.
The overwhelming evidence shows that copy protection methods do still significantly reduce PC game piracy despite all being crackable to some degree by the most "l33t" crackers.
"Do you realize what you just said is the equivalent of claiming that a new computer monitor will give you better CPU performance?"
This is why analogies are so awful and destructive to rational discussion.
On the face of it this analogy seems apt despite the fact that - as other replies point out- it's actually completely incorrect.
In this case we're talking about technical facts so it's possible to decisvely prove the analogy is wrong, but in most areas of life (particularly things like politics & sociology) it can be nigh on impossible to judge an analogy's true validty so if it sounds O.K. (as the above one does) then most people may believe it whether it's right or wrong.
A politicians dream, but like I said, terrible for rational discussion.
I don't think they failed to predict the internet, rather they were set on trying to create their own version of it. One which they would have been solely in charge of.
"You would have to be, oh I don't know, Britney Spears in order to make a comfortable living off being an "artist" in an environment of unrestricted piracy."
You already have to be someone like Britney Spears to make a comfortable living being an artist!
The way I see it, and what I was trying to get at in my post (probably not very well) is that at present the music publishers work to concerntrate the industry's takings to just a relatively few 'promoted' artists. With 99% of musicians making virtually nothing (from album sales at least).
Whilst I don't doubt piracy is reducing the industry's total takings, I think piracy helps disperse what is taken much more widely. People rarely fork out the extorinate price of a CD on a band they've never heard of before. If you can get that album for free though then you are far more likely to discover you like "unknown band X's" music. This then opens up the oppurtunity for the band to actually make some money from you, an oppurtunity which for 99% of bands is currently almost non-existant.
"Yes - either hordes of people are buying and playing music they don't like through the mind-control technologies of the music industry or... outlandish as it sounds, many people like something that you don't."
People buy what's available. People didn't not buy 386's back in the early 90's even though we have far better today.
"Complaining about Britney is doubly showing people's age"
1. I believe I'm younger than Britney, 2. Where exactly in my post did I complain about her? I actually don't mind her music. 3. It is possible for a non-old person to dislike Britney Spears.
I complained about the method through which she becomes an international hit where's someone with a better voice misses out due to factors purely advantaging a music publisher.
"the current UK government is run by people who are terrified that US companies will withdraw from the UK "
Well lets see, of the 4 big music studios (listed in order of global sales from 2005 http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20050802.html), you have: Universal: French SONY BMG: Japanese / German EMI: British Warner: USA
So of the four, only the fouth biggest is even a "US controlled" company. I also very much doubt Warner (as with any company) "wants" to withdraw from the UK. That makes precisely no sense what-so-ever; they are after money for shareholders, not some sort of nationalistic bragging competition (which is all completely meaningless in reality anyway).
I do hate this kind of analysis though because in reality they are all "mutli-nationals", with shares being constantly bought and sold by stakeholders from all over the world. Universal for example is owned by "French" conglomerate Vivendi but laregly headquatered in the USA, but also comprises of the PolyGram studio which is/was German.
Re:How to cut internet piracy by 80%
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Exactly. Not just advertising though, but marketing and media attention.
Everyone knows who Britney Spears is whether a fan of her music or not. She's been on TV countless times, has songs played daily on radio stations around the world etc. That's what the record publishers are all about (unsurprisingly, people don't tend to buy music they haven't heard from artists they don't know of). It's a very different job from actually making music.
Music piracy doesn't prevent music being made, it just stops people making large amounts of money directly from music sales. Those who are purely driven by financial reward through direct music sales might stop making music, but 'artists' will keep making music just as now. Through aspects such as concert sales, they still also have the opportunity to make healthy fortunes.
If the stranglehold on music of the record publishers can be removed we will start seeing music return to being based on talent rather than "prospective sales figures" record executives have assigned to new artists. At present, the quality of the music is only a small part of that "prospective sales figures" calculation; aspects such as: sex appeal, ease of publicity (heavy drug use seems to be good for this at the moment) and market positioning feature at least as high on the list as the actual quality of the music.
The less stranglehold a few select record company conglomerates have one the industry the wider selection of artists which will get chances to gain the publicity needed to get a band off the ground.
But some people who work in the IT industry are brainless monkeys. It's just the simple truth and saying it doesn't degrade everyone who works in the industry, it just degrades those who deserve to be degraded.
Of all valid votes counted: Labour got 36%, Conservatives got 33%, Liberal Democrats got 23%.
Also, although some polls (which are only estimates) did indeed put Conservative support among young people as the highest of the major 3 parties, adding up the votes of the two 'left leaning' parties (i.e. Labour & Liberal Democrats) shows far more young people voted for 'left leaning' parties rather than 'right leaning' parties (as is consistent with general political attitudes of younger voters in most western countries).
"We regularly extradite suspects to the USA, yet the USA refuses to do the same for people living in the USA wanted for crimes in the UK."
There have been several people extradited both ways, very few are controversial.
I remember there was an absolutely despicable incident where the US military refused to allow a soldier to attend a British coroner's investigation about a British soldier killed in a friendly fire incident.
That incident was a complete disgrace and has undoubtedly strained US-UK relations purely to prevent some incompetent guy from looking bad, but it has little to do with the US-UK extradition treaty (due to military exemption).
"There's no complicated reason, companies charge more for products in europe because they can."
Exactly. The average person's net wealth (after paying for essential goods & services) of Western European countries is generally higher than that in the USA, so people there are generally willing to pay more for 'luxury' products like software, entertainment media and branded goods.
This is jsut how economics works. If you visit countries with a lower median net wealth than the USA you'll almost always find luxury goods are even cheaper in those countries (although availability will likely be less as a result).
"I'm not really sure what the point of this is...what is anyone going to do with 10-20 grams in orbit?"
I couldn't disagree more. Getting anything into orbit for less than 1000 GBP has a great number of uses. Several "pico-satellites" have been put in orbit, of which the various CubeSats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat are good examples. These use relatively inexpensive equipment and the lightest of them are only a few hundred grams so I do not think it ridiculous to envisage someone developing a 20 gram satellite.
If the launch could be done for under 1000 GBP then it raises the realistic possibility of 'personal satellites', which at the very leat sound really cool. Not to mention the numerous research and possible commercial applications of large numbers of small but inter-connected & inexpensive satellites.
I just tried it by searching for a bit of programming help. Clicked on a result which appeared relevant but instead took me to a spam page featuring multiple large pornographic banner ads.
As I'm at work - working for a large corporation with strict internet policy - I'm now hit by the paranoia that trying out this search engine may possibly have just got me fired!
The article is a bit misleading though in that the crucial word in the above summary is "may". The ISP's have agreed they will send out warning letters, but not blocking and throttling (although most the ISPs listed already employ some throttling of heavy users at peak times already).
"but there is nothing wrong with that because Apple has no monopoly in any market."
Nothing wrong to you maybe, personally I think no matter what the game, the players should all be playing by the same rules.
"the whole sue-the-blogger fiasco was grounded in law"
Yea, grounded in bad law, which doesn't make it right. The Nuremberg trials after the Holocaust established that.
Let's be clear, given the evidence at hand, if history was different and Apple were in Microsoft's position there would be, if anything, far less openness and freedom for innovation in the software industry.
Slashdot Mirror
"and their camera blank when they get out of jail in a few hours with no charges filed against them"
Yea right, what a load of cr@p. If this actually did happen to anyone with half a brain, they would have a quickfire way of getting a compensation award and having the cop fired.
Any lawyer would jump on this easy chance to get some cash.
Who exactly is the "they" in your particular paranoid fantasy world?
I couldn't live without meat, but I have for some time now stopped eating Beef. Reasons:
1. Beef is amongst the most unhealthy meats around (good cuts aside, but they sure aren't what goes into your typical burger...).
2. Cattle farming is by far and large the most expensive & enviromentally damaging aspect of agriculture. Countless new compounds and potential scientific discoveries (from numerous fields) are being lost as the Amazon is cut down to produce cattle feed.
Therefore, I figure not eating Beef helps lengthen life in 2 ways. Longer time till you get heart disease (or similar), and when you eventually do, it's more likely there will be a drug available to cure it!
"The fact that Google won those suits, for the most part"
Huh?
Of the three examples, Google won only 1 of them (the news syndication case) in court and even then the judge still curtailed Google's plans somewhat.
The Gmail lack-of-privacy legal issues are ongoing and I certainly don't think many would claim they "won" the suit they settled out-of-court with the book publishers.
"you wasted two weeks of your life writing ineffective copy protection that does nothing to slow down pirates"
Just because someone managed to crack his copy-protection system doesn't mean writing it was a waste of time, it could still be having a massive effect on piracy levels.
Security (intellectual in this case) is never about complete 100% infalliblity, that's impossible. For example: no matter how thick the walls of your bunker are there will always be some bomb somewhere capable of beaking them down, if not, some nuke, if not some asteroid... but that doesn't mean a bunker with 3-metre thick walls isn't a damn good place to be when bombs are falling nearby.
Security is all about risk reduction.
The overwhelming evidence shows that copy protection methods do still significantly reduce PC game piracy despite all being crackable to some degree by the most "l33t" crackers.
"Do you realize what you just said is the equivalent of claiming that a new computer monitor will give you better CPU performance?"
This is why analogies are so awful and destructive to rational discussion.
On the face of it this analogy seems apt despite the fact that - as other replies point out- it's actually completely incorrect.
In this case we're talking about technical facts so it's possible to decisvely prove the analogy is wrong, but in most areas of life (particularly things like politics & sociology) it can be nigh on impossible to judge an analogy's true validty so if it sounds O.K. (as the above one does) then most people may believe it whether it's right or wrong.
A politicians dream, but like I said, terrible for rational discussion.
"hell, they failed to predict the INTERNET."
I don't think they failed to predict the internet, rather they were set on trying to create their own version of it. One which they would have been solely in charge of.
I'm sorry but I simply disagree. I've found typing text messages on the iPhone to be far slower than my old phone's conventional keyboard.
I also think using touch to tell if a key has been pressed is far more efficent than using a ever-so-slightly delayed audio sound.
"You would have to be, oh I don't know, Britney Spears in order to make a comfortable living off being an "artist" in an environment of unrestricted piracy."
You already have to be someone like Britney Spears to make a comfortable living being an artist!
The way I see it, and what I was trying to get at in my post (probably not very well) is that at present the music publishers work to concerntrate the industry's takings to just a relatively few 'promoted' artists. With 99% of musicians making virtually nothing (from album sales at least).
Whilst I don't doubt piracy is reducing the industry's total takings, I think piracy helps disperse what is taken much more widely. People rarely fork out the extorinate price of a CD on a band they've never heard of before. If you can get that album for free though then you are far more likely to discover you like "unknown band X's" music. This then opens up the oppurtunity for the band to actually make some money from you, an oppurtunity which for 99% of bands is currently almost non-existant.
"Yes - either hordes of people are buying and playing music they don't like through the mind-control technologies of the music industry or... outlandish as it sounds, many people like something that you don't."
People buy what's available. People didn't not buy 386's back in the early 90's even though we have far better today.
"Complaining about Britney is doubly showing people's age"
1. I believe I'm younger than Britney,
2. Where exactly in my post did I complain about her? I actually don't mind her music.
3. It is possible for a non-old person to dislike Britney Spears.
I complained about the method through which she becomes an international hit where's someone with a better voice misses out due to factors purely advantaging a music publisher.
"the current UK government is run by people who are terrified that US companies will withdraw from the UK "
Well lets see, of the 4 big music studios (listed in order of global sales from 2005 http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20050802.html), you have:
Universal: French
SONY BMG: Japanese / German
EMI: British
Warner: USA
So of the four, only the fouth biggest is even a "US controlled" company. I also very much doubt Warner (as with any company) "wants" to withdraw from the UK. That makes precisely no sense what-so-ever; they are after money for shareholders, not some sort of nationalistic bragging competition (which is all completely meaningless in reality anyway).
I do hate this kind of analysis though because in reality they are all "mutli-nationals", with shares being constantly bought and sold by stakeholders from all over the world. Universal for example is owned by "French" conglomerate Vivendi but laregly headquatered in the USA, but also comprises of the PolyGram studio which is/was German.
Exactly. Not just advertising though, but marketing and media attention.
Everyone knows who Britney Spears is whether a fan of her music or not. She's been on TV countless times, has songs played daily on radio stations around the world etc. That's what the record publishers are all about (unsurprisingly, people don't tend to buy music they haven't heard from artists they don't know of). It's a very different job from actually making music.
Music piracy doesn't prevent music being made, it just stops people making large amounts of money directly from music sales. Those who are purely driven by financial reward through direct music sales might stop making music, but 'artists' will keep making music just as now. Through aspects such as concert sales, they still also have the opportunity to make healthy fortunes.
If the stranglehold on music of the record publishers can be removed we will start seeing music return to being based on talent rather than "prospective sales figures" record executives have assigned to new artists. At present, the quality of the music is only a small part of that "prospective sales figures" calculation; aspects such as: sex appeal, ease of publicity (heavy drug use seems to be good for this at the moment) and market positioning feature at least as high on the list as the actual quality of the music.
The less stranglehold a few select record company conglomerates have one the industry the wider selection of artists which will get chances to gain the publicity needed to get a band off the ground.
But some people who work in the IT industry are brainless monkeys. It's just the simple truth and saying it doesn't degrade everyone who works in the industry, it just degrades those who deserve to be degraded.
"more people voted conservative than Labour at the last general election."
Um, sorry but that is complete rubbish. From:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4528655.stm
& http://www.le.ac.uk/mc/research/papers/mc05-1.pdf
& http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/2005_british_general_election.htm
Of all valid votes counted:
Labour got 36%,
Conservatives got 33%,
Liberal Democrats got 23%.
Also, although some polls (which are only estimates) did indeed put Conservative support among young people as the highest of the major 3 parties, adding up the votes of the two 'left leaning' parties (i.e. Labour & Liberal Democrats) shows far more young people voted for 'left leaning' parties rather than 'right leaning' parties (as is consistent with general political attitudes of younger voters in most western countries).
"We regularly extradite suspects to the USA, yet the USA refuses to do the same for people living in the USA wanted for crimes in the UK."
There have been several people extradited both ways, very few are controversial.
I remember there was an absolutely despicable incident where the US military refused to allow a soldier to attend a British coroner's investigation about a British soldier killed in a friendly fire incident.
That incident was a complete disgrace and has undoubtedly strained US-UK relations purely to prevent some incompetent guy from looking bad, but it has little to do with the US-UK extradition treaty (due to military exemption).
Pity none of them seem to know how to change the default Windows Administrator password!
He didn't so much "hack into" the Pentagon & NASA, more just walked in by using the default Windows password.
The real criminals are the incompetent military heads who allow monkeys to be charge of I.T. security.
Your version actually manages to be even less funny!
"There's no complicated reason, companies charge more for products in europe because they can."
Exactly. The average person's net wealth (after paying for essential goods & services) of Western European countries is generally higher than that in the USA, so people there are generally willing to pay more for 'luxury' products like software, entertainment media and branded goods.
This is jsut how economics works. If you visit countries with a lower median net wealth than the USA you'll almost always find luxury goods are even cheaper in those countries (although availability will likely be less as a result).
"I'm not really sure what the point of this is...what is anyone going to do with 10-20 grams in orbit?"
I couldn't disagree more. Getting anything into orbit for less than 1000 GBP has a great number of uses. Several "pico-satellites" have been put in orbit, of which the various CubeSats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat are good examples. These use relatively inexpensive equipment and the lightest of them are only a few hundred grams so I do not think it ridiculous to envisage someone developing a 20 gram satellite.
If the launch could be done for under 1000 GBP then it raises the realistic possibility of 'personal satellites', which at the very leat sound really cool. Not to mention the numerous research and possible commercial applications of large numbers of small but inter-connected & inexpensive satellites.
Well the vehicles would be operating on a solar-electric power plant. I'm sure there must be some sort of clean power-source nearby they could use...
Ahh, great...
I just tried it by searching for a bit of programming help. Clicked on a result which appeared relevant but instead took me to a spam page featuring multiple large pornographic banner ads.
As I'm at work - working for a large corporation with strict internet policy - I'm now hit by the paranoia that trying out this search engine may possibly have just got me fired!
The article is a bit misleading though in that the crucial word in the above summary is "may". The ISP's have agreed they will send out warning letters, but not blocking and throttling (although most the ISPs listed already employ some throttling of heavy users at peak times already).
"but there is nothing wrong with that because Apple has no monopoly in any market."
Nothing wrong to you maybe, personally I think no matter what the game, the players should all be playing by the same rules.
"the whole sue-the-blogger fiasco was grounded in law"
Yea, grounded in bad law, which doesn't make it right. The Nuremberg trials after the Holocaust established that.
Let's be clear, given the evidence at hand, if history was different and Apple were in Microsoft's position there would be, if anything, far less openness and freedom for innovation in the software industry.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say sometimes Apple's anti-competitive practices make Microsoft look like angels by comparison.
I'm no M$ fan in anyway but I do find it remarkable how much stuff Apple get away.